Seeing Is Believing?

Overview

Objectives/Goals Can memories be warped and changed by suggestion? If so, to what extent does gender play one's susceptibility to suggestion? And finally, are eye witness testimonies trustworthy? Methods/Materials 1)Gain consent from subjects. 2)Show subjects video. 3)Pass out the narratives. 4)Subjects have 40 seconds to read over narrative. 5)Administer the test. Subject will have 3 minutes and 30 seconds to complete the test. 6)Collect the tests. 7)Tell the subjects they can't share any aspects of the experiment as it will taint the results. 8)Grade the tests based upon details. 9)Record scores. Results We found that across the board females had done better than males in all three treatments (false, control, and true). We tested 306 people ages 12-19. Females had done 1.6% better with no suggestion, 2.6% better when subjected to false suggestions, and 3.2% better when subjected to true suggestions. Conclusions/Discussion We confirmed our hypotheses, but we uncovered more questions. We hypothesized that memories can be warped and changed by suggestion, females are less susceptible to suggestion due to the female mind tending towards noticing and remember details, and eye witness testimonies are not as trustworthy. We proved that memories could be warped and that females were less susceptible to males. When we compared the true and control treatments for the females something strange happened. The false treatment did better than the females of the control treatment. We had expected for the false statement to affect the false subjects so that their scores will be lowest of the treatments. We came up with a hypothesis in order to explain this. Because the female's mind tends towards observing and remember details, they were able to see through our false suggestions, thus being able to salvage their scores. Looking individually at the questions being answered incorrectly, we could see that either genders were indeed being misled by the false suggestions, though as a whole their scores do not reflect this. The fact that some questions are

Awards (1)

• Fourth Place

Competition history

• CSEF 2011 Behavioral & Social Sciences · Entry S0416

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.

Browse more like this

• All Behavioural and Social Sciences projects
• CSEF Behavioural and Social Sciences projects
• Every CSEF 2011 project
• CSEF Fourth Place winners